Modernizers Even Before Modernization

As a rapidly constructed state, Pakistan did not inherit a centralized state machin­ery.^[166] It could have experimented with new forms of governance, but did not. What are the explanations for this? One may be that the founding father had internalized the ideas of the colonizers.^[167] The founding father of Pakistan, Jinnah, was a Lincoln Inn’s graduate, and under the influence of liberal British parliamentarians.^[168] The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was also a student of Exeter College, Oxford.

Apart from Jinnah’s position on Islam and Pakistan, one thing is certain, after 1857 Ghadr, Muslims of the subcontinent had a fear of exclusion at a political level. Materiality of the idiom of Islam or Muslim identity was only to that extent and should be traced in those class formations. Munir is right that Jinnah was not a communalist.^[178] Then what about two-nation theory he espoused, that Muslims are a separate ‘nation’ from Hindus? This was a later development in its ‘particular’. To understand the later developments of the grafting of Islam on the modernist con­stitutionalist version of Jinnah’s state, there is a need to explore the class formations under Liaqat Ali Khan after Jinnah’s sudden death in September 1948.

2.4